To document my readings and to share quotes/insights from those readings. Enjoy :D

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Motivational quotes 301 to 350

‘Your job is not to figure out how it’s going to happen for you, but to open the door in your head and when the doors open in real life, just walk through it. Don’t worry if you miss your cue. There will always be another door opening. They keep opening.’ Jim Carrey

‘And when I say, “life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you.” I really don’t know if that’s true. I’m just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so that I can deal with them in the most productive way. You’ll come up with your own style, that’s part of the fun!’ Jim Carrey

‘You are ready and able to do beautiful things in this world and after you walk through those doors today, you will only ever have two choices: love or fear. Choose love, and don’t ever let fear turn you against your playful heart.’ Jim Carrey

‘All great successes, all great lives have involved the coincidence of aptitude, talent but also the luck of meeting people who have believed in you. At some point in your life you need to meet someone who will tap you on the shoulder and say, “I believe in you.”‘ Arsene Wenger (Wenger the Legend by Jasper Rees)

‘To live in accordance with how one thinks. Be yourself and don’t try to impose your criteria on the rest. I don’t expect others to live like me. I want to respect people’s freedom, but I defend my freedom. And that comes with the courage to say what you think, even if sometimes others don’t share those views.’ Uruguayan President José Mujica, on happiness

‘If there is one lesson I can share from the experience it is this: share your truth. Whatever your truth is, live it, share it. The world will respond to you in ways you never could have imagined. Life will blow your socks off.’ Kamal Ravikant

‘Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.’ Joseph Campbell

‘The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.’ Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA founder

‘Attitude is about marrying the person you love(MPUL) and loving the person you marry (LPUM). Apply this concept of marriage to “all things you do.”‘ Chan Chun Sing

‘Success was a function of effort more than talent – with opportunities and chance thrown in. The sum of this should be greater than IMM (I, Me, Myself).’ Chan Chun Sing

‘How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.’ Steven Pressfield

‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.’ Goethe

‘The more one does, the more one can do.’ Amelia Earhart

‘It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them.’ Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

‘Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil – the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.’ William George Jordan

‘Our level of development is fairly obvious with tennis or piano playing, where it is impossible to pretend. But it is not so obvious in the areas of character and emotional development.’ Stephen Covey

‘We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.’ T. S. Elliot

‘Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken.’ Horace Mann

‘I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.’ Henry David Thoreau

‘Doing well academically certainly helps. But to succeed in life, raw intellectual ability needs to be coupled with other life skills such as the ability to communicate effectively, to cope with change, to overcome setbacks, and to work with and mobilise a team.’ Simon Chesterman

‘It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or neutral, but when they are positive.’ Shawn Achor

‘Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.’ Shawn Achor

‘More important still than believing in your own abilities is believing that you can improve these abilities.’ Carol Dweck

‘That is not to say that all jobs have equal meaning, but that even a rote or routine task can be meaningful if you find a good reason to be invested. You feel productive at the end of the day. You showed people that you were smart and efficient. You made life easier for customer…’ Shawn Achor

‘In other words, the people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened. These are the people who actually use adversity to find the path forward.’ Shawn Achor

‘Research has shown that people who believe that the power lies within their control circle have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, and are much happier at work.’ Shawn Achor

‘Studies have shown that the more team members are encouraged to socialize and interact face-to-face, the more engaged they feel, the more energy they have, and the longer they can stay focused on a task.’ Shawn Achor

‘A longer, 15-year study even found that employees who had a difficult relationship with their boss were 30% more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease. It seems a bad relationship with your boss can be as bad for you as a steady diet of fried foods – but not nearly as fun.’ Shawn Achor

‘Great people do things before they are ready. They do things before they know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that, that’s what life is. You might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s really special. And if you’re no good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself.’ Amy Poehler

‘But the greatest liability of this group of graduates is precisely their history of success. It might seem churlish to point this out at a graduation ceremony, but the ability to do well in exams is a poor predictor for achievement in anything else.’ Simon Chesterman

‘It’s your life – but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.’ Eleanor Roosevelt

‘People mature at different rates and their interests change. Students drop out of university. Many students go on to get jobs that have nothing to do with what they studied at university. How we are able to use the knowledge we have is often far more valuable than the knowledge itself.’ John Crace

‘You might be going for a walk or grocery shopping or doing something that doesn’t require sustained attention and suddenly — boom — the answer to a problem that had been vexing you suddenly appears. This is the mind-wandering mode, making connections among things that we didn’t previously see as connected.’ Daniel J. Levitin

‘If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day.’ Daniel J. Levitin

‘I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the sufferings of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

‘Find what you love and let it kill you.’ Charles Bukowski

‘The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.’ Mark Twain

‘I think part of why people teach themselves things – why I do – is really for fascination or love or something that drives them to need what they’re learning. I’ve never known what it’s like to be uncurious.’ Karen Barbarossa

‘The beautiful thing about learning on your own is you have to be motivated about the subject to do it. Anyone can go through the motions at school, but self-learning may be the easiest way to find out what you’re good at.’ Charles Kinnane, a film-maker

‘When you’re learning something, it’s really important to not only to understand the system and context in which that thing functions, but also to look ahead and imagine what the world would be like with or without this thing.’ Rita J. King

‘I’ve found that, by and large, people who are passionate about the things that they do are very happy to engage with other people that are passionate about what they do.’ Dan Sinker

‘If you can’t unite making your living with the things you love, which is obviously ideal, then sometimes it’s best to keep them totally separate.’ Astra Taylor

‘Getting stuck for me has been one of the best teachers. It has taught me the huge difference between just knowing the answer, and knowing how to find the answer.’ Christopher Bathgate

‘In asking for their knowledge, people are even more willing and even more generous if you have done something to show that you’re interested and you’ve made a commitment on your end as well.’ Jeremy Cohen

‘I try to surround myself with incredibly smart people who are often, if not always, smarter than me. Because other people are so important to learning.’ Harper Reed

‘Try to learn as many things as possible and not be afraid to fail quickly and keep trying, or switch tracks. You’ll get experience and valuable lessons in a variety of fields, and you’ll occasionally stumble across things that you thought you were going to be bad at, and it turns out you’re pretty good at.’ Luke Muehlhauser

‘I’m really naturally interested in learning things, but there’s one way to guarantee that I lose interest, and that’s to tell me to be interested in it, even if I am.’ Zack Booth Simpson

‘If you write every day just a little bit, it just becomes a thing you do. It becomes much easier to do it even on days when you don’t feel like doing it, and especially on days when you’re not feeling it.’ Cory Doctorow

‘Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’ Robert F. Kennedy

‘Once you know yourself, the deliberate pursuit of more ordinary things can then deliver that same level of happiness. It doesn’t hurt, either, that you may appreciate the ordinary much more once you’re more aware of the decreasing number of years you have left to enjoy it.’ Ron Lieber